Industrial ovens are devices with heating chambers that are used in a variety of industrial applications, including drying, curing, or baking components, parts or final products. Industrial ovens can be used for large or small volume applications. Components, parts or final products can be processed in batches or continuously with a conveyor line, and using a variety of temperature ranges, sizes and configurations.
Industrial ovens can be used in many different industrial processes, including chemical processing, food production, and electronics fabrication, where circuit boards are run through a conveyor oven to attach surface mount components.
A type of industrial oven is a humidity chamber or oven. Many humidity ovens can control humidity and temperature within their chambers. A conventional use for humidity ovens is environmental testing. As a part of such use, an important concern is with achieving critical endpoint humidity levels as opposed to controlling each humidity level (that an object is subjected to) from the beginning to the end of a process. Some conventional humidity ovens control humidity levels in a single chamber. In such cases, relative humidity data is used to adjust temperature and water levels over time. Other conventional industrial heating chambers, such as surface mount electronics reflow ovens (used for soldering) only provide temperature control. Commercial ovens, such as Smit™, BTU™, etc., provide high temperatures but do not provide humidity control.
As such, conventional humidity ovens have functional and design limitations that effect how they can be used. More specifically, their functional and design limitations can render them unsuitable for some advanced or specialized industrial applications that require the capacity to provide processing that strictly adheres to a specific temperature and humidity profile. Consequently, conventional humidity ovens can be unsatisfactory for use in some advanced or specialized industrial applications.